


where lies the strangling fruit

by ohroses



Series: tales from yharnam [1]
Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Gothic, Tragic Romance, i wanted gothic romance, i wrote gothic romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 10:26:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19439569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohroses/pseuds/ohroses
Summary: Tied to a cross and burning was a Beast. Large, beautiful, its pelt shone in the rising sun and its eyes, though glazed, were bright with color. Its size was massive, its maw gaping, its gaze pained. It must have been dead. But she felt, she clearly felt, that it was looking at her.





	where lies the strangling fruit

**Author's Note:**

> I was... seized by a desire so strong... I had to try my hand at a bloodborne 'rescued' NPC.... I was thinking about the implication that there are some descendents of vilebloods littered about Yharnam. That and what a Hunter might go through if they........ fell in love, fell into an obsession? If a Hunter was a worshipful, exhausted sort. I gave that role to my only male Hunter character. 
> 
> About the title: I'm painfully obsessed w Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and the wall writer creature, the being that ... ok here's a twitter thread to explain myself. [ the thread ](https://twitter.com/bIoodrose/status/1145814288960851968) ENJOY!

The castle was silent before the bloodshed. She didn’t remember much about it, but she remembered the haunted silence of a place that had never been silent before. The men who brought it appeared through the cracks in a wardrobe and the gap between her mother’s chest and her upper arm—

Her memory of the time before that was faint.

She remembered being watched by someone kind and a little frightening when she played with the other children, and she remembered distinctly knowing that those eyes were for her alone and not for any other frolicking, laughing child.

The truth of that night was hidden somewhere inside her. All she could really claim to remember was the road stretched wide before thundering hooves, the beauty of the snow and the bright, crimson red of the gashes in her mother’s chest. She could see, towering over her childlike form, the gates of Yharnam. They rose before her like smoke over a fire and imposed on her like the sudden warmth of a blazing hearth.

Glimpses of a scene, a man, crying, holding her mother close, a creature hovering just beyond them, darting up the fireplace when it caught her gaze, its long fingers lingering behind it, scratching and scrawling in the ash.

Her eyes lingered on that hearth even as her mother wheezed and grasped for even a single breath. She could not remember the thing she saw, somehow it was too terrible for memory, and too frightening to think about. Slowly, her eyes fell back to the horror of a dying mother, away from what she could barely begin to understand.

People often wondered whether anyone else survived the massacre of that noble line. They often wondered it in deathly whispers, safe and sound in whoever’s parlor during whichever party. The word was that there was a pinch of salt’s worth of descendants left over to continue the despised line of the vile castle. She did not know who they were, or if she was considered one of them. She emerged from the castle that night, but in what capacity and in what way she existed within that place… the memories were locked to her.

It mattered not. Her mother died of a blade’s slow-acting poison days after delivering them both safely to the home of her brother, her father was likely a headless skeleton in the halls of that once-great Castle. Whether her mother was a Cainhurst wife or a Cainhurst plaything, a Cainhurst servant, or cook, or maid— it didn’t matter. All that was left of either of her parents was the memory of blood, the rustle of silk, and their frozen, staring child. Her eyes fixed with horror, as her own mother died, on the fireplace.

Something was in there.

It was always on nights of the Hunt that the thundering of hooves clamored for attention at the edges of her every thought.

Like she did on all those nights, she lit the small lantern in front of the enormous window. It hung carefully and locked in place with a chain, elegant and ancient and familiar. She took a stick of incense and secured it in the little contraption hidden within the lantern and lit that too. Finally, she went back inside, and from the warmth of the tearoom, she swung the bars like a cage over the windows, latched the shutters, and she drew the curtains tight and secured them with little knots at the bottom, ensuring no one could see inside. Something about tonight was different. She sensed a frenzy in the city, almost from the stone beneath her.

Sometimes the men who passed the window on these nights were kind, sometimes not, but always… always they would knock on the door, or linger about the window and rattle the bars, or put their hands up on the glass between the iron and wait. Or they would stand before the window, silent, still, watching for shadows, breathing steady despite the stench of blood on their coats, their clothes, and in their boots. She dreaded those silent ones the most. They stood there as she leaned back against the wall so that her silhouette would not appear on the curtains. They stood, stared, and waited; it was as if they knew she was there, holding her breath, waiting for them to leave. She wondered, in the early days of braving the Hunts alone, what true Hunters did as they passed houses, back when they were still around in numbers that rivalled the beasts.

These men terrified her. Their stillness, their muttering, their exceptional stench. Sometimes they’d speak clearly. They’d say: “tell me something, miss…” The coarser and more faded would say other, horrible things, and then they’d fall silent again. And she would cover her mouth with her hands until her gloves were nearly damp with her breath. It was as though she had to force replies back from her lips, like they’d spill out and into the night if she didn’t physically hold them in.

One night, after it felt like she’d been through a thousand cups of tea and a million pages of the books her late tutor left stacked up to the ceilings throughout the small, creaking study, she heard a presence of silence.

It was a pointed and deliberate stillness, and where a steady rustle of faraway noise had lulled her mind’s awareness moments before, the sudden absence of it forced her body to take heed.

She began to set her cup down carefully, slowly, but the small clink would be unavoidable even if she pressed her finger to the edge of the bottom and used it to lower the cup down slowly. She let it clink.

She stepped out, knowing which floorboards to avoid, which to favor, and ignored them all as she approached the window. She knew this manner of perfected silence, and she knew that it would not be fooled.

“Let me hear your voice, at least.”

She leaned forward, her hands creeping towards the sill and the fastened cloth, just stopping shy of the knots. This was a true Hunter, the likes of which she had seen only a few times before. The only kind she’d respond to, for these were often so different from the others. This one was a little gentler in speech than the Crow who used to linger in corners, and much larger, but more vicious judging by the hideous contraption strapped to his back. The Crow never seemed to carry weapons, perhaps her mask had scared away all the Beasts

Yes. There he was. A small crack between the two drawn curtains revealed him in parts to her. The blood on his clothing and his hands was vulgar in its excess and the width of his shoulders seemed to be for the sole purpose of hefting his gored, machinated axe. She shuddered. 

“I frighten you,” the voice said again, and then “ _I frighten you still,”_ almost muttered into silence with his hushed voice.

She could not lie, for a silence was an admission and a denial was a lie, but she had no recollection of having met this Hunter before. She would have remembered this one. He must be a little mad from his Hunt.

“Yes.”

A sigh of disappointment, or maybe a sound made in imitation of disappointment by one who did not know what disappointment (or rest, or even happiness) was.

“Will you let me in? Just to rest for a moment.”

“No, Hunter. No.”

“Will this night ever end?”

“Surely it will.”

“Will I see your face? I am a man yet.”

“Goodnight, Hunter.”

Still he stood, unmoving and determined with eyes like beacons beyond his collar and beneath his hood. She suppressed a shudder when they seemed to meet hers. She saw only the gleam in them, and it was echoing with hunger.

“The night is long, my Lady.”

She watched as he stood still and did not move. When he did move, she heard the inevitable screech of a human man dying and her Hunter’s boots clicking on the pavement as he left yet another body behind.

He’d probably killed the fool for lingering at her window. He might have had him in his grip, dying, the whole time he begged to see her face. She returned to her tea and smiled, sitting at her plain little table, never in her life so placidly happy to have ended up in such a hell.

_She saw her first Beast when her uncle died._ He was a good man, strong, a little too fond of the needle, but he did his best by her when he took her in. Her mother died young, unnatural causes, and left behind a seven-year-old, undersized, whining, precocious parody of a girl in clothes too fine for her new life and with a legacy too dangerous to even whisper about.

But she was still a girl, even with her mother’s sins and her father’s name and the fresh stains of blood on her childlike hands. Her uncle’s gruff stoicism soon soothed that out into dignified fondness at the onslaught of her tendency towards high-pitched laughter.

His three sons matched him for strength of mind but outmatched him in gentleness, and it was always one of the three who tended to her scraped knees and injured extremities. Her uncle was by nature gruff, a little unused to women and to speaking to anyone who did not work in his employ. In short, she was a strange girl and they were a strange set of men.

Her cousins, young as they were when she came to live with them, took it upon themselves to make up what he lacked in a soft manner. It wasn’t his fault, they all knew this, but it wasn’t healthy to have a girl brought up in a house with so much wordless grunting and clearing of throats. Sometimes she’d fix him his tea after the day was out and he’d barely cough out a thank you before taking it up to his study.

So when her cousins one by one grew up, and the eldest of them even left home to live far, far away, they expressed deep worry about this sort of a situation.

She didn’t mind, truly, though her cousins thought for certain it broke her heart. It didn’t. That was just how her uncle was. In truth, she preferred sitting in silence with him as he pored over his books and charts and maps of the human body over sitting in pleasant company with the motherly and sweet Lady Adams’, the lady he sent her to twice a week in an effort to save on employing a governess.

One woman in the house, she often thought, was more than enough for her uncle. He didn’t do well with society, but he was a stunning doctor. He was a gentleman without need for work, but his blunt nature and stern stoicism suited bedsides better than parties and balls and tea. People would breathe sighs of relief to see him at the door when their loved folk were ill and then blush and stammer and fidget when they saw him on the street. He didn’t quite know what to do with himself when people spoke to him.

He stared a lot. Like something was inside him, gazing out of his red-rimmed eyes at them all. She felt often like it was that thing inside him that she befriended, that she loved so well.

Nevertheless, she loved him fiercely and set about learning to be a lady with great passion in order to avert the glares of disapproval she imagined he’d receive if she did not. She often, in her girlhood, could perfectly imagine some walrus-faced old man mistreating her uncle out there in front of the world if she so much as sneezed in public.

And though a girl of six would pass between her uncle’s study and her uncle’s parlor and her uncle’s friends, clacking away on the floors in her pretty, scuffed up shoes, and a girl of six could bother this or that man with all manner of inquiries about anything Beastly, a girl of sixteen doing the same was always peered at more closely and with more suspicion.

So, in an effort to squash the whole business and save his niece from side-long looks and chatter, her uncle set her up with the eccentric Lady Adams, his distant cousin, who had made a fortune by writing and dispersing a strange volume of instruction titled _The Art of Deportment in the Age of the Beast_ ; _a Lady’s Guide in Turbulent Times._

Lady Adams, a bit of a nouveau riche sort but respectable enough to hold the favor of a great many impressive and ranking nobility, was sympathetic to the process of education. So, on Sunday and Saturday her uncle would mutter to himself and tinker away in the safety of the basement and she’d take the simple and chaperoned walk from her house to the ornate, fine house above the square. The Lady, always a bit of an intimidating figure to her in her youth, would pounce on her and set to teaching her dances and needlepoint and some blood ministration here and there and whatever other things an accomplished lady ought to know.

One day, as the Lady embarked on the difficult quest of teaching a girl of eighteen how to shoot a blunderbuss but _delicately_ , things changed. The lesson went on as usual, and it ended as usual, and she left the presence of the Lady as usual. There was some hectic energy in the street, a franticness she avoided as her maid guided her past puddles, and years later she knew that if she had tarried a little longer at that Lady’s manor, a servant would have prevented her from leaving. And if she had been a bit hastier, she would have… things would have been different.

But she didn’t notice the tension in the air that evening. She was too happy to be done with her lessons, too happy to be going home, where everyone was gathered together for the first time in many months. She was too happy, that day, to pay attention to anything but getting home as quickly as possible.

It was on that day that something went wrong beneath the house. No one would let her back in to see, but men in uniform and men without uniforms were gathered outside her beautiful family home.

And on the street before them, not even in the garden where they might be comfortable, were three prone figures covered with white sheets. Sheets stained red in places and sooty black in others. Her eyes drifted to the chimney with the kind of languid slowness that came from true terror, but as always, nothing was there—just as nothing had been there every other time she’d checked for the past ten years.

Someone handed her a pen and paper, probably to keep her busy, and instructed her to write to her eldest cousin as soon as possible and inform him of the disaster that had befallen his family. She knew then that they were trying as hard as possible to pass her along as someone else’s problem sooner rather than later. She took the pen and paper and wrote but knew that there was no use. Her eldest cousin had surprised them last night and come home early, she herself had scolded him for traveling so close to a night of the hunt. _What if you had been delayed and you arrived with the Hunt? What if someone knew you were to come, and lay in wait?_

He had laughed and held out a small box over her head, teasing her with a gift, as he was wont to do. A flower, a pastry, a kitten, and now a small little box with something beautiful inside. He had always tried to make it better. He promised to give it to her in the evening, after her lessons, if she was quiet and did not chastise him at all.

She sat in the coach the uniformed men prepared for her, shocked out of memories, with the curtains drawn to hide the three bodies laid out and wrote nothing very diligently.

The sun was setting, people were lighting their lamps, her world was disintegrating, and her home was gone. They took her to the same manor she had just left that night, the Adams’ home she was so familiar with. They lit the fire, left her with the Lady and someone or other’s wife and someone or someone else’s grandson armed with a gun, an axe, and an oil lamp. She sat, staring into the fire, for hours. This fire held no terror, this hearth no memory of monsters disappearing into its depths… it was all wrong.

It was in that moment, wrapped up and vacant in front of the tranquil flames that she realized with full force that there were only three bodies on the street under the rising moon. The rush, the chaos, the hurry to be indoors as soon as possible… she had missed something obvious. She, with all the pieces of her heart frozen still, had forgotten someone.

What she did then still amazed her. That was back then, years ago. That was back when the thought of braving a Beast or a man was numb in her mind, her grief stunning her thoughts and slowing her fear. Now, years later, she’d never have the same shock of bravery. She’d never sneak from a high window after requesting a moment alone on the night after her family’s murder, spending an age silently moving the creaking bars outwards and swinging from a dresser out onto the slight facsimile of a balcony above the door over the street, with her skirts awry and in disarray.

But she did it then, that horrible night. She grasped onto the pillar beneath her and lowered herself down, more and more, and found herself standing in the strange alley beneath. There was a man up ahead. She went the other direction, dimly reconstructing the paths of the city from this new perspective, her hand on the wall and her eyes straight ahead.

No rat that fled beneath her feet startled her and no grumbling curses from armed, lowly men shook her. She avoided them easily, and within a blur of a moment that she could never fully recall, she was standing before her home. She approached her old home with her eyes straight on the distant chimney. Nothing revealed itself there. She was terrified, but she knew it was just her and that thing left.

It was all that was left of her old life.

The spires of the gates rose above her as she approached, the mist of the streets and the familiar filth of the city swirled in harmony and her heart lifted a fraction of an inch. The rush of the investigation, if there had been anything resembling one, had left the house unattended and the gate unlocked. The last time someone had turned and attacked a human, the inspector had ordered that house’s entry gate padlocked and its windows boarded up. The word was that the sights would offend those gazing in, but she knew it was because they would attract the wrong sort of crowd from the Church. Even back then, even in those days when people were reeling from the Church’s burning of the old city, people had _felt_ what was to come, what was to be.

Her house’s windows were not boarded up, nor even shut. Here it was, a night of the hunt, and yet every window was thrown wide open. The house looked oddly alive like this, in the light of the cold moon and the dim lights of the street’s lamps. It wasn’t protected, there was no incense burning within or without, but she knew where it was kept. It had been, after all, her duty to light it on these nights.

She would light the incense, window to window, and her cousins would settle in to do the accounts and other small oddities of business while her uncle retreated to the basement. The fire would be lit, a little dampened so as not to draw attention to the house in any way, but it would be almost cozy. Nights like those were warm, full, and her family was home. Sometimes she’d even convince her uncle to come up from the bottom of the house and sit with them, she’d bring tea and cookies so her cousins would be tempted to put away the books, and they would sit together in chatter or silence, comfortable despite the horrors of the night.

She pushed those memories from her mind and worked the gate open with all her strength. She had never had to do that before now, and she’d never realized how difficult it would be. She hoped the sound would attract no strange attention, but the houses were so close together even in their finery and stately beauty that she was certain those locked up and safe nearby had heard, perhaps they were even peeking through their curtains to see her standing there with naught but a dress and slippers to her name and her gloves already soaked and sullied through from a mere passage through the city on such a night.

She pointedly ignored the spot the three bodies had been put out, unable to summon grief for mysteries but all too ready to provide the dread of grief. She felt oddly numb, like her fingers felt now in the cold, but inside of herself. She noted dispassionately the strange smear of blood on the doorway, a handprint that had slipped and its owner had fallen. Much bigger than hers. She remembered when her cousins would help her mount the horses or down from carriages, and how their hands dwarfed hers, and when her uncle would hold her hand when discussing her prospects and how happy she’d be with this doctor or that lesser Lord or—

She pushed the door open and watched it swing, the lock shattered, and the handle crushed, and stepped inside to hold court over the ruins of her life.

It was strange at the time; the familiarity of her home drowned out the horrors of the scene. But now, in memory, the oddities were all that stood out.

There were her uncle’s bottles dripping red in front of the fire, staining her favorite spot on the hearth, imbuing its safe, mundane familiarity with something unspeakable when it was spilled onto the floor.

She found herself too distracted at the time to give them the attention they were due, something in her wrote them off and stared instead, alert, at the scratches in the wall and the vases toppled over. The flowers she had arranged so proudly, satisfied that anyone who entered their home would know her uncle had taken care of her and done right by her, since she knew how to arrange flowers. How silly the thought was now, that a vase of flowers so easily toppled over would do right by his honor where she, happy and healthy, could not.

The windows, ajar and letting in a small breeze that carried the stink of a city, stole her attention. Her slippers muffled her steps against the heavy carpet the cat had been so fond of kneading and she diligently, with great care and study, drew the glass in, fastened it, and tied the curtains down. She reached into the small drawer hidden directly beneath the sill and pulled from it the incense that was her responsibility. She realized she had fastened everything already and found herself too tired and lazy to open the windows and undo the latches to light the lantern once more. She let the incense slip into her pocket, a packet tied together with a ribbon, and took the box of matches for good measure.

She probably ought to light it, given that she was out here, on the night of a hunt, alone and unprotected. She pulled it out again.

But something told her, something unbidden in her mind, that the Beasts were gone tonight. That they would not return. She remembered the three figures, covered with sheets; crimson stained and pure white at the same time and she knew that the Beasts were not the greatest of her worries.

The thing, looking at her and fleeing into the hearth.

If there were Beasts here, she thought, they wouldn’t hold a candle to the thing that had fled from her that first night in the house. Her fear of it was still strong, but it was tempered now by a calm acceptance deep within her soul. She put the incense away once more, safely into her pocket.

Lady Adams’ once wrote in her book: _“while the mysteries of the Beast confound, the nature of them remains constant. For are we not all intimately familiar with beasts?”_ She had thought, at the time, that this meant that one always heard stories about wild dogs or large cats and lions mauling someone or other, and Beasts were rather like that.

She was beginning to think more and more about that portion of the book, however, and found that her memories of it were remarkably unclear. No matter how much she stood at the window and told herself very sternly to _think_ , her mind drifted away. To the vases, toppled over, the scratches low on the wall, the blood on the doorway, the way the bottles were empty and poured out in front of the hearth.

The fire, she wondered, when was the last time it had been lit? She remembered lighting it that morning, as the sun rose, for the chill had disturbed her and she thought her uncle would take comfort in the warmth.

What had he done that morning? Before she left to visit the Lady, he had shuffled about and coughed, pointedly avoiding the chair the doctor had prescribed for him. He had complained of the cold until she lit the fire, and then he had sternly avoided it and gone down to the basement. When it was time for her to go, he had come back up, a pleased light in his eyes and he had stroked the top of her head and bid her walk safely as he always did. And then…

She moved towards the fire, long put out and evidently by someone pouring water upon its flames. The ashes were pressed down; the patterns of streams running through the ashen hearth clear even in the moonlight streaming in from the single undrawn window. A breeze danced in, stirred the hair upon her neck, and did not stir but the fewest bits of ash. The bottles clattered a little as she stepped forward and accidentally nudged one to the side. Someone had poured something out onto the fire, and it had run out into the hearth bit by bit, she looked at the smears of thick liquid where the carpet ended and the stones began.

Her uncle’s bottles. She had assumed, initially that someone had poured them onto the floor, but she saw now that they merely pooled there. She reached for a bottle, and proximity showing her that the liquid that ran in the soot was not just dirty, it was filthy black and viscous. There were strange marks around the spill, like someone had messed about with the pooling liquid, thin tendrils extended like someone had dipped a quill in the blood and—

_No._

Turning away from the hearth, she put that strange, foreign, ancient terror aside and grasped for something more familiar.

She had always been forbidden from touching a single one and had once had her hand rapped very sharply with her uncle’s cane when she had attempted to sniff one. The lesson stuck in her mind. She tentatively picked one up from where it had rolled further away from that strange, terrifying hearth, surprised at how heavy it was, even empty, the glass was thick and tempered opaque, murky like the contents.

That left only one domain unseen, her uncle’s basement, forbidden to all but his eldest son.

Three bodies, impossible to identify through the sheets, lined up neatly for her perusal by the gate and on the street. Tomorrow, with daybreak, she’d know for certain.

She approached the hall and stoically passed by the scratches on the walls. She noted the way they tore the wallpaper and tore with it the wood, each mark jagged, tears within tears. The wood splintered, the curtains frayed, there were framed photographs and paintings on the floor, cracked from their fall. She picked up one and saw it was her family, her uncle and his sons, and her, sitting in the middle, doted upon and so, so foolishly blind.

There it was; the small door at the end of the hall, past the stairs that led to the rooms she’d grown up in, that she had grown up running between whenever a nightmare beset her. She opened the door to the basement, half expecting an outraged shout from somewhere behind her, a firm hand on her shoulder to yank her back to blissful ignorance.

Then, as if in response to her daring betrayal of the laws so long ago set by her uncle, the night alit with screams and howls.

In terror and confusion, she turned and ran back to the fire, back to instinctive safety, to the place she had spent her days curled before while her family scribbled and squabbled and—

Where that thing had hidden itself away, as clear in her memory as the soot of the fire before her eyes.

She picked up a poker and stood still, waiting, silent and aching for a noise, for a shiver, for something to betray anything.

Nothing came. The moonlight remained in place, spilling into her and turning her hands sickly blue. She turned back to the hall and went back to the door that led to the stairs that spiraled down into her uncle’s mysterious home within a home. The hallway spread out before her like a road into the night, and it stayed in her memory, a fixture to remind her of fear.

She did not move for many hours, the presence of something evil, ancient at her back and her uncle’s secret, labyrinthine study in the basement and its mysteries holding her in place.

At daybreak she left the vials and books and charts that so resembled the charts and books of her uncle’s office upstairs and took only a bag filled with writings scrawled in her uncle’s hand and a series of papers marked by investigators with the small, meticulously numbered signs of an investigation. She knew it was immoral, but she stole what they had claimed and told herself that she was protecting her uncle. From what? She did not know, but the vases and pictures and the single bloodied handprint, the three corpses… the vials… the strange patterns in the blood. She knew without knowing.

She took the photograph from the hall as well, and as the dawn gave way to something resembling day, she trudged through the streets with a shawl wrapped well and tight around her face and her head and she hunched over to avoid attention. The familiar path was wrought with carnage, and since she had never been allowed out after a Hunt before, she realized that she did not know what was usual and what was not. The men who lay cut and destroyed before her were cut cleanly, elegantly. There was a hand here that would not show itself, not a claw or a monster’s talon. Feathers crunched under her slippers, and only later did she think to _wonder_ about that.

She continued forward, dimly aware of about thirty men shouting around something alight and burning. She knew fire scared the Beasts, but she had always assumed that was why the nights and mornings smelled of smoke and charred things after Hunts.

She was wrong.

She looked up slowly, slowly, her shawl slipping and her back straightening, and she ignored the men as they gasped and pointed her way.

Tied to a cross and burning was a Beast. Large, beautiful, its pelt shone in the rising sun and its eyes, though glazed, were bright with color. Its size was massive, its maw gaping, its gaze _pained._ It must have been dead, but she felt, she clearly felt, that it was looking at her. She approached, ignoring the muttered honorifics and curses as they poured from unshaven mouths and dirty faces.

_“It’s the girl-.”_

_“Miss.”_

_“It’s her.”_

The Beast’s eyes…

Something glittered on the ground before her, something bright and gold.

Gold was rare now, in Yharnam, when silver was so favored for its supposed effects on the Beasts. The city had cycled through silver, through religious symbols, through garlic once, and now it was decided that fire and garlic were the best of amulets. Gold had faded quickly from popularity but remained as a symbol of trust between couples. A risky symbol, but she knew ballads where a woman would accept a golden token from her lover because of his great prowess as a Hunter. She was secure in protection as long as he was near and had no need for silver, and still more ballads expounded on the exchange of a lover’s gold ring for silver following the heartbreaks of separation.

She knelt and reached for it and bit back a gasp once she had brushed the dust and debris from its shining face.

The very same golden rose she had admired the last time she had visited her eldest cousin and his family, that he must have put in that box to ease her ire only a night ago. She looked up from her place in the dirt and realized, belatedly, that she was sobbing brokenly. Sobbing like her heart was torn.

She never knew with true certainty who was mounted so horrifically on the cross to be burnt. It could have been any of them, anyone who had taken that gift for her and promised to give it to her himself, anyone who had pocketed it that night, it could have been pickpocketed from a body in the chaos, dropped accidentally.

Her teacup shook in her hand at the memory of the mauled faces and bodies of her family, barely recognizable, easily unrecognizable. She grieved indiscriminately, it didn’t matter who had been mounted on flames and who had been gored in the sitting room. The investigators begged to differ, but then she had never told them about the bottles and the necklace.

To the end, to the very bitter end, she had protected her family and her family’s honor.

The police never suspected that her brother had been there, there was never an extra body mentioned. If he had been reported missing up North, the word never reached her, likely shielded from her by mustached men harrumphing about feminine upset. She didn’t mind.

The papers she had saved were littered with nonsense, incomprehensible, obscure, arcane. Useless. She hid them anyway, she kept them and guarded them like a treasure. She put them in the chimneys, imagining the creature of her childhood hovering above them, aching for them…

She had cleared her uncle’s study that night as her mother had wiped clean the blood and rouge from her child’s face and combed the careful curls and plaits from her own hair, as she had entered the ancient city and beautiful home of her ink-stained and foreboding brother. She arrived the prodigal and fallen sister, the wayward pet of nobles engorged on forbidden blood, finally come home to die. She felt, at the time, rather like her mother’s shadow. Unsure where that woman began and she ended, unsure who it was who had died that night. Had her mother lived, her child falling dead in her arms, had she gone mad from the loss of her child, invented her a new life only to bring her back to the world in the same straits, the same desperation that she had left it?

This Hunter lingered a long while. She felt, in his silent presence, the temptation to cross to the dampened fireplace, lazily crackling, and put it so that she could reach the stash of meaningless nonsense her uncle had left behind. She always hid that stolen treasure in the chimney, out of reach of the flickering flames. Now that the Adams’ family home was her own, those scrawled mysteries took their place behind a small copper grate meant to prevent dead birds and such stuff from falling into the flames.

At night she sometimes heard, or imagined, long fingers trailing over the pages gently, picking at the birds, waiting, reaching for her.

But despite these violent desires, she remained seated in the same spot she had been that disastrous night all those years ago and gazed into the fire with the same baleful arrogance. Let the Beasts come, she thought. She had a hunter outside the window and a necklace to prove fate paid her special attention. Things could not have changed more for the better since that night, but the world was still bleak. Things cried out to her in the night, strange inhuman babies sobbed, and every morning the city was burnt anew.

Something followed her back from the empty, blood-drenched house that night. Something probably followed her the night the Castle fell. Something had been following her forever.

The chants of praying men lingered in her mind on these nights; _grant us eyes._

When they prayed and chanted that phrase over and over, she whispered _take mine_ under her breathand thought of the endless nonsense scrawling words her uncle had kept working on for years in his study, of the thing she had seen retreating from her gaze, its long fingers dipped in ancient blood.

The study was long gone now. She had sold the property when she inherited her distant Aunt’s home. She couldn’t bear to see the familiar house again. She sold the carriages and purchased a small buggy meant for one, but it had proven useless when the ashen blood rose again, and the streets became chaos.

The city was filled with the dead, with bound and chained coffins, the streets were filled with fallen men, horses, strange creatures no one had seen before, and abandoned carriages. She thought, often, that she needed to leave, to be done with this place, to abandon that thing in the hearth, the things her uncle wrote, to leave them as her mother had left that castle in the dark.

That thought was never clearer than on this night, with the new and fresh Hunter lingering outside her window and her uncle’s madness beckoning her into an endless hallway, down endless stairs,, into a familiar fireplace, a consuming hearth.

The Hunt was beginning again, this time in earnest.

The world beckoned and eyes begged to see.

She rose and walked over to the window. Many eyes were on her, she felt them. _Grant us eyes_. It was as though every man’s prayer was granted, and every bestowed, gifted eye was turned to her.

“My Lady, won’t you let me in?”

_His lady walks over to the window, her nightgown barely rustling, yet giving her away, and he watches her silently, repeating his ancient request to be let in. Just once, just once, if she would just answer differently once—_

_“Maybe I want to leave,” she says, “more than you want to come in.”_

_“That’s impossible,” he replies, somehow able to speak over his thundering pulse, his dry throat, his terror. She’d never said anything but “no,” before. “This city is no place for you now. Your own rooftops harbor horrors you cannot see.”_

_The night progresses, the night has changed, and he is left here before her window, waiting, begging—_

_“And yet here I am.”_

_He feels starved, starved and full._

_“Why this time?” he asks, hoarsely. “Every other time, you’ve refused. Just a moment ago, you refused. Why now?”_

She stepped forward _,_ the sound of _this time_ and _now_ ringing in her ears and moved the curtain aside slightly.

His eyes were ravenous, though she was not completely moved by their torrid gaze. They chased every movement, they landed swiftly onto her golden necklace, they passed over her hands multiple times, and then, still hungry, they met her own eyes, lingered, before they fell back to her neck.

She realized she didn’t answer his question.

“You’ve only asked me twice, my Hunter, and though you linger long at my window, the night is yet young,” she said. “I wouldn’t toy with you.”

_He scoffs._

_She never remembers. None of them do, but for some reason he always expects her to._

_He tells her things. Disturbing things that unsettle her, things that she immediately forgets. Things he sees without even seeing with his eyes._

_“There’s something that desires nothing more than to enter your home from the smokestack, promise me that you will not allow it inside.”_

_The thing’s long fingers scrape into the stack and scratch the soot covered bricks within, stopping just short of a pile of papers and small books, and perhaps what was once a dead bird, but she cannot hear it. It hears her, every day, every morning it hears her, every night of the Hunt it leans in further and further. He knows this. Every time he comes to this window it is there, waiting, lingering, like him. It knows…_

_She has fled from the window again, but he can still perfectly remember every part of her._

_The night has progressed._

_He leaves. He will come back once more, if he survives long enough for the night to inch forward just another hour._

_Just a little closer to the dawn._

_He tries to imagine what the sun would look like, touching the inhabitants of the houses, shining through their windows…_

The urge to look at her uncle’s words was too strong to resist now. She could not describe the desire, but it overcame her now violently, as violently as it had in the early days of his loss. Back then she had spent hours deciphering them. For it wasn’t reading.

She ran to the fireplace and throttled the rest of the weak flame with an iron shovel, the thought of those strange writings of her uncle’s heavy in her mind. She leaned into the heat and smoke and rising ash to reach for her long coveted stolen treasures, her uncle’s nonsensical crimes, and grasped for the small metal latch keeping the iron grate in place.

For the first time in years she pored over them, though it was hardly necessary anymore. She remembered the drivel like it was engraved into her mind. She memorized so much of it from her obsessive reading and rereading in the days following the incident, when she was allowed to shut herself in a room within the manor and refuse visitors, investigators, any caller. She went without food, in those terrible, peaceful days, reading the notes over and over.

She battled a strange hunger, a yearning, to be back within the basement in the days after her uncle and his sons were taken from her. It would come over her suddenly, violently, an urge to go back to the old house. To see it again, to get her hands on more, more, _more_ of her uncle’s strange words. She didn’t understand them. She didn’t understand anything. She had grabbed in her haste one of his old articles on the properties of the source in the days of its discovery, and she understood most of those words _alone_ , and she knew she was no fool, but together all the words did not make sense.

There’d be a line… a line that she would trace with her eyes for hours without grasping even a single aspect of its meaning. Every time her eyes would alight on a concept it would fracture like glass and creep back into the scattered, nonsensical words that hid it, leaving her falling into nothing. She would go back to the beginning, tirelessly, and there it would be again, that same thread of sense, of recognition, and then as she followed it…

Fracture; endless and destructive.

She spent hours like that. Past grief, too lost for tears, praying for her eyes to be taken if only to never see a line of her uncle’s mad writing again.

Now, again, she lingered over the words.

She could feel the night growing in darkness, moving forward. She agonized over the words until that careful silence dawned again, like it had at sunset. She felt that silence like a summons.

“My Hunter,” she said.

“My lady,” he murmured, and she heard it over the agonies of the silence. “Go to Oedon Chapel. Take this and travel lightly. It’s only for the Night.” He held out an incense lantern. She took it and watched as he returned into the shadows from where he had first come to her.

It was cold. The night was darker now, and the light was weak. Her eyes lingered in dark spots, and her hand shook, making the shadows that the lantern cast quiver. But something called to her in the darkness and it was more than him and his voice, it was as though it called from outside and came from inside. From her hearth. 

She hesitated only a moment before gathering more incense into her only pocket, where a small pair of sewing scissors patiently awaited use. She closed the door behind her and stepped out into the night with nothing but the nightgown she wore and the lantern in her hand.

She felt, at the sensation and sound of her feet hitting the stone of the streets and as the moon colored wind tossed her hair about with the scent of burning, as though she had been lifted up into the night and sent back to the last time she had torn through the streets of Yharnam in slippers and a loose gown..

She stepped forward lightly, almost gladly, her uncle’s mad writing clear in her mind and the creature that was always at her back inching ever closer.

Not alone, never alone, she went; something scratching over the rooftops overhead with her every step.


End file.
